Intense inner cognitive-emotional states, such as love, passion, and goal-directed motivation, have been the source for some of the greatest achievements of mankind throughout the ages. The recent neuroscientific localization of passion within subcortico-cortical reward, motivation, cognitive and emotion systems in the human brain supports the hypothesis that passion is a goal-directed drive with predictable facilitation effects on cognitive behavior, rather than a pure and simple emotion.
Many scales, questionnaires or tests aim at evaluating a passionate mental state in a conscious way, but none of the existing tools does so in an objective manner. In the existing methods, the test subject is typically asked or induced to express verbally what his mental state is. The test subject's behaviors or responses to questions are unavoidably influenced by multiple external and internal factors, often obscuring the subject's true inner mental state, or preventing the subject from expressing it.
What is needed is a method and system of providing a cognitive, non-invasive, objective, and fast test, which allows determining quantitatively the inner cognitive-emotional state of participants on a sound neuroscientific basis. Also what is needed is a behavioral diagnostic tool that avoids the subjectivity inherent in the existing methods for evaluating cognitive-emotional states.